Nurture Faith with Dr. Doug Hood

“Love is patient, love is kind, it isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant.”

1 Corinthians 13:4 (Common English Bible)

It is reported that Abraham Lincoln once made a speech before a huge audience and was greeted with loud and long applause. As he was leaving the podium, a man said, “That was a great speech Mr. President; listen to how they enjoyed what you said!” Lincoln, in his usual self-deprecating manner, responded, “I am kept humble by the fact that the crowd would be twice as large if I were to be hanged.”[1] Always modest, never vaulting himself or puffed up, Abraham Lincoln cared little for his own reputation. He did not need to. His love for his country and his desire for useful service characterized by empathy, humility, and respect for opposing opinions made him as large as the monument erected in his honor in Washington, D.C.

“Love,” the apostle Paul writes, doesn’t brag, nor is it arrogant. These two qualities of love are closely related to each other. “Doesn’t brag” refers to outward conduct and behavior; “isn’t arrogant” refers to an inward disposition. Together they characterize someone who is modest, ready to stoop to serve. We think again of Jesus on that dark night that he was betrayed. On their way to the Upper Room, the disciples disputed as to whom of them was the greatest. Each of them presented arguments for their own claim to the highest honor. The result was that when they arrived in the Upper Room and took their seats, not one of them would stoop to the humble service of foot washing. So, Jesus rose from the table, took a towel and a basin, and began to wash the disciple’s feet.

The church in Corinth is experiencing quarrelsome behavior that is dividing the faith community. Various members are elevating themselves, declaring possession of the greater spiritual gifts. The one who has the gift of tongues believed they exercised a gift beyond compare, especially over the more plain and practical gift of prophecy. The same manner of boasting and argument infused the discourse over any number of spiritual gifts. Rather than placing each gift at the disposal of the community, to bless and build, competitiveness became the order of the day. The result of all the boasting was friction and strife. The cure for all that, writes the apostle Paul, is love—a love that has no mark of brag, or swank, or swagger. Genuine love, love that builds the community of faith is modest.

Love never seeks to assert its superiority. The love that Paul desires for the Corinthian Church is one that serves, seeking the welfare of others. That love takes no notice of the worthiness of another. Nor does it seek acknowledgment. Only one concern is present—to serve another in a manner that eases the strain and burden of life. It is a love that is captured by the belief that God continues to be at work in the lives of individuals, reconciling them to God and changing them into something so much more than they presently are. As this demonstration of love takes possession of our souls, what is ugly, bitter, and broken in our lives is diminished. What increases in our hearts is patience and love that knows no jealousy and celebrates the gladness of another.

Joy,

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[1] Cobb, “Real Life, Real People”, 108.

Rev. Susan Sparks wrote the following meditation to be featured in Dr. Doug Hood’s upcoming book, A Month of Prayer and Gratitude: Five Minute Meditations for a Deeper Experience of Gratitude.

As a minister, you love everyone in your congregation. However, if you’re honest, you have to admit that there are certain people you are especially happy to see. For me, that was Sarah Goodson. Raised during the Depression on a share-cropper’s farm in the South Carolina low country, Sarah loved two things in this life more than anything: her family and taking care of people. She moved to New York City in the 1940s to give her family a better life and became a nurse to care for others. She made those two things a priority in every part of her life—down to what she carried in her purse.

I always loved to see Sarah coming into church with her big ole pocketbook because I knew what was in it. After each service during coffee hour, she would open her overstuffed bag and pull out the newest photos of her grandkids (not individual photos, but the old school kind where you flip open the book and the photos unfold in zig-zag plastic holders all the way to the floor). Then, as the picture albums were being passed around, little Ziploc bags and Tupperware containers would magically emerge from that purse—bags full of fried chicken, collard greens, shrimp and okra gumbo, oxtail stew, hot corn muffins with blueberries, and, of course, peanut butter pie. One time I asked Sarah how she got all that stuff in her purse, and she told me about a gratitude ritual she performed every Saturday night. She would sit at her kitchen table, remove all the extra, heavy junk in her bag that she had collected during the week, then fill it back up with the important things for which she was grateful: photos of her grandkids and food to feed her church. It was a simple thing: cleaning out her purse. Yet it had such an impact, including the smiles on people’s faces as they looked at the photos of the grandchildren and the comfort felt by all who ate that delicious food.

Perhaps we follow Sarah’s lead and do a little Saturday night purse cleaning of our own hearts. Let’s start with this question: What emotional baggage are you carrying today that you should unload? Everyone’s answer is probably different. I’m going to pick one that I bet most of us carry: worry. Easy to do, fixes nothing. Rev. Joyce Myers once said, “Worry is like a rocking chair—it’s always in motion, but it never gets you anywhere.” Worry can take over our lives, crowd out all things that matter, even make us sick. But we have an alternative. We can clean out the purse of our heart and hand our worries over to a greater power. Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy leads, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Bottom line: worry or believe. You can’t do both. Which leads to my next question: What will you put in the place of worry? What is important to you? For what purpose are you here? I suggest that we follow Sarah’s lead in this, too. When I had the great honor of performing Sarah’s funeral after she passed away, the message that people shared over and over was that she had brought them joy and made them feel loved. Is there any greater legacy?

This week, do a Saturday night purse cleaning in your life. Identify the things that are weighing you down emotionally, physically, or spiritually and clean them out. Then, refocus on the things that matter. Spend time with your family. Share photographs that make people smile. Stuff a Ziploc bag of yummy food in your purse or pocket and share it with others. Bring a little love and joy to this hungry world. And do it today. As Sarah would say, “Life is too hard and too short to carry things that just don’t matter.”

Joy,

The following meditation was written by Dr. Doug Hood’s son, Nathanael Hood, M.Div.

Once in a priory in Paris, there lived a monk. A clumsy but well-meaning fellow, he’d left behind the secular world in his twenties to join the Carmelites, a Catholic order devoted to poverty and prayer. His life before the order had been a difficult one—born an impoverished peasant, he’d fought as a soldier in the cataclysmic Thirty Years’ War which decimated central Europe in the early seventeenth century. He saw much fighting, was once almost hanged by enemy troops, and was left lame by his injuries. Unable to remain a soldier, he began his new life of prayer and contemplation in 1640, taking the religious name “Lawrence of the Resurrection.” Brother Lawrence’s first ten years as a monk were difficult ones which saw him battling feelings of guilt and unworthiness. But as the years crept by, he eventually surrendered himself to God’s mercy and became a model monk. He spent most of his life quietly toiling away in the priory’s kitchen, a job he initially disliked, only switching to a less strenuous one after one of his lame legs became ulcerated.1

Brother Lawrence died at the age of 80 in 1691 after a lifetime of service, but unlike most monks and nuns who live and die in historical anonymity, we remember his name and deeds over three centuries later. A collection of his letters and sayings were gathered together after his death by a cleric named Abbé Joseph de Beaufort and published as The Practice of the Presence of God, a remarkable little book that’s been published in countless editions in several languages. The book is suffused with the insight and wisdom of a man whose “principle endeavor [was] to stay as close as possible to God, doing, saying, and thinking nothing that might displease Him.”2 Indeed, it could be said he was a man who loved, worshiped, and prayed as a child.

But what does this mean, to love, pray, and worship as a child? For an answer we turn to the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus’ disciples come to Jesus with a question: who among them would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Jesus’ answer took everyone by surprise, explaining that the greatest among them would be those who were most like a child. Part of the shock of Jesus’ answer came from the lowly status children had in ancient Israel, but much of it came from the idea that adults should mimic children! Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Children are loud, emotional, demanding, and often smelly! How could children possibly be a model of faith and piety? For that, I would answer that anyone who has spent a good amount of time among children know that they don’t do things by half-measures. They love mightily, hate bitterly, feel deeply. To be like a child is to surrender oneself entirely and wholeheartedly.

The great preacher and writer Harry Emerson Fosdick once wrote that “to pray to God as though he were Santa Claus is childish; but a man may still be childlike in his faith and range up into another sort of praying.”3 Put simply, to pray selflessly is childlike; to pray selfishly is childish. God wants us to offer up our earnest needs and desires in prayer, yes, but it should be accompanied by our total surrender to the Almighty. Just as a child rushes into a parent’s arms, so must we rush into our Heavenly Father’s arms when we pray. Consider Brother Lawrence. He could have done nothing but pray for healing in his legs or a better job outside the hustle and bustle of the kitchen—but that would have been praying selfishly. Instead, he prayed to know God in his every waking moment, both at rest and at work, in his strength and in his weakness. May it be so for all of us every day.

Joy,

1Miller, Patricia. “Introduction.” Introduction. In Walking with the Father: Wisdom from Brother Lawrence. Ijamsville, MD: The Word Among Us Press, 1999, 7-11.

2Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1982, 28.

The following meditation was written by Doug Hood’s son, Nathanael Hood, M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary

Of all the teachers I had while studying for ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, few left as remarkable an impact on me as C. Clifton Black, the Otto A. Piper Professor of Biblical Theology. As the author of over twenty books and more than two hundred published articles, he was an academic institution unto himself, a one-man library of biblical insight. Lover of jazz, Shakespeare, classic Hollywood movies, and impeccably tailored three piece suits (regardless of the weather), he cut the impression of a man who drank deeply and joyously from the well of life. His immensity of character spilled into the classroom where, frequently overcome by emotion, he would punctuate important points by slamming down an open palm and bellowing like a Baptist preacher. He did just that during my first class with him in a course examining Jesus’ parables. “EVERY WORD,” his hand pounded on the table one early Spring afternoon, “of scripture is PREGNANT with meaning!”

This first lesson has stayed with me over the years since my graduation. When we read scripture too quickly or casually, we risk missing important details that might otherwise transform our understanding of God’s holy word. Consider, for example, the Lord’s Prayer. As presented in the Gospel of Matthew, the Prayer is taught by Jesus as the model for how all Christians should pray. But for many Christians, the prayer is less a matter of devotion than one of muscle memory, a word or phrase repeated over and over again until it loses its meaning. But in his masterful commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, Dr. Black forces readers to slam on the brakes and consider each word with the same care we would use to view a precious jewel. What, Dr. Black asks, is the prayer actually saying to us?

Remarkably, much of the answer can be found in the prayer’s first two words: “Our Father.” Our father. Not my father, not your father, not his or her or their father, but our father. The first word of the first line is an invitation to community. “The Lord’s Prayer is never privatist,” Dr. Black writes, “[the word “our”] pulls the Prayer’s supplicants out of selfish individualism into a relationship of ever-expanding generosity.”¹ Of course, this isn’t to say that we can’t or shouldn’t pray specifically for ourselves and our own needs—Jesus himself prayed for his own deliverance from the cross in Gethsemane. But in this first word of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus presents us with a model of community.

And what is that model? That can be found in the second word: our Father. Not leader, not lord. Not creator or king, not liege nor ruler. We come to our God as little beloved children, not cowering subjects. Put together, the two little words “Our Father” are not just an address but a command. Remember, they whisper, that even in our solitude each of us are part and parcel of a sacred community held together by a mighty God, a Lord who protects and cherishes each of us as equals. Yes, it is good and proper to pray for our own needs. But here in the Lord’s Prayer we hear Jesus slam his own hand on the classroom table, reminding us that true prayer should be the antidote to selfishness. True prayer should lead to selflessness, instead.

Joy,

1C. Clifton Black, The Lord’s Prayer, of Interpretation – Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 78.

Dr. Doug Hood’s wife, Grace Cameron Hood, B.C.E., wrote the following meditation.

In my neighborhood, we have a lot of birds. We have a big group of white ibis that spend hours rooting and pecking for worms. The theory is that when there are ibis around, there will be no hurricanes. Do you know what a group of ibis is called? It is a Colony. I found this interesting and funny so I started looking up other names of animal groups. A group of ants is also a Colony. A group of roaches is called an Intrusion. Dolphins are a Pod; fish are a School. Some of my favorites include hippos known as a Thunder, rhinos a Crash. Parrots are a Pandemonium, while eagles are a Convocation. Our friends the owls in their wisdom are a Parliament. Giraffes are a Tower. My absolute favorite is a group of flamingos is called a Flamboyance.

Each name reflects something about the individual participants. Roaches are indeed an Intrusion that everyone in Florida knows and pays to have removed. It doesn’t matter if you call them roaches or palmetto bugs, nobody wants to find them in their house. The wild parrots in South Florida are also aptly called a Pandemonium as they go from branch to branch, screeching wildly. So, what about a group of people who worship God and come together every week? They are called the CHURCH. Just as the name of each group is a descriptor of members, the word CHURCH should also describe us.

The word CHURCH means ‘House of the Lord’. In this space, we come together regularly, worship God intensely, sing, and hear music that soars to the heavens. We are instructed in who God is and what God wants in our lives. We participate in the action of giving, praising, thanking, serving, and hearing. This happens all around the world. I have been in many types of churches. My first memory is of an open-air church where we all sat on logs under palm branches in Congo. I have also attended beautiful churches in Congo decorated with woven clothes, high tin roofs and long hard benches. Gold-plated cathedrals in Brazil contrast to the small woven churches in the Brazilian Indigenous Reservations. A plain building that is a Quaker church in Pennsylvania stands near huge mega-churches that meet in hotels and schools. Stained glass windows are one of my favorite additions which appear in old country churches in muted shades of orange and brown and culminating in the breath-taking windows in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

What ties all these structures together is the word CHURCH, House of God. What characterizes this word around the world is a sense of gratitude. Gratitude for a place to be the people of God. Gratitude for the family of God that comes together in worship and praise. Gratitude for being able to stand up and be counted as part of the group of people that stretches around the world. Gratitude is known and shown as members of the church bend over to help each other, to accept and celebrate our differences, to open wide the doors, and make room for more people who call themselves members of the ‘House of God’ or the CHURCH.

Joy,

Occasionally, many who pray experience an inadequacy—an inadequacy of words, an inadequacy of expression of a deep longing or need. In those moments, this teaching from the Book of Romans offers the assistance of the Spirit. When words fail us, the Spirit is sufficient to overcome our difficulty. John Calvin, a leading church leader in the 1500s, beautifully notes, “we are supplied with heavenly assistance and strength.”[iii]Simply, the promise here is that we are not left alone in our stumbling for adequate words. We are transported to Dostoyevsky’s bridge, where we meet the Spirit who speaks to God on our behalf. We knock on God’s door in prayer and God responds with an impulse of the heart that we are understood even in the absence of words. As the protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s story, we also experience a powerful sense of intimacy—an intimacy with God through the intercession of the Spirit. 

It is the ultimate paradox—where we are the weakest, God’s power is the strongest. Unable to pray, as God would have us pray, the Holy Spirit searches our hearts and crafts prayers on our behalf. It is, finally, an act of grace. Where we are inadequate, God completes the work of prayer. It is work because it results in changes in attitudes and behavior—changes that are the direct outcome of prayer. It is sacred work because it results in a conversion from seeking God’s blessings for our own small projects to becoming captivated by God’s hopes and dreams for us. The Spirit’s prayer on our behalf results in an interruption of our lives. We become attached more firmly to God’s redemptive work in the world. Looking back on the shape and character of our former prayers, we realize how inadequate they really were. They were about us, not God. They were about our individual pursuits, not about a life in a relationship with God.

What remains is a promise. When we don’t know how to pray, when we are at a loss to communicate effectively with our Lord, the Spirit restores communication. From the earliest pages of the Bible, we see that human rebellion and sin broke intimacy with God. That resulted in our hiding from God when God came walking in our garden. With “unexpressed groans,” the Spirit pleads our case before God. We know that God is receptive to the prayers of the Spirit on our behalf because the Spirit “pleads for the saints, consistent with God’s will.” (Romans 8:27) Now we have confidence in our relationship with God—and for our future—because both are now held in God’s grasp, not ours. Without the Spirit interceding on our behalf, it is a certainty that we would continue stumbling in sin and hiding from God. Because God has now taken control of our feeble utterances we can now rest quietly before God, confident that the Spirit will express well our longings.

Joy,

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  [i]Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (London: Folio Society, 2021) p. 3-48.

[ii]Dostoyevsky, 11.

[iii]John Calvin, Theological Foundations: John Calvin, Commentary on Romans. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022) 198. 

The following meditation was written by Hannah Anglemyer, a youth at First Presbyterian Church of Delray Beach.

My math teacher from my freshman year of high school had a tradition each year right before we took midterms. She went around to each one of her classes with a little black bag containing a bunch of tiny rocks with motivational sayings or phrases etched into the front. Then, without knowing what the rocks say, we all reached inside and grabbed one. According to her, the rock you grabbed is supposed to be something you need or something that can motivate you to get through midterms. The rock I grabbed had the word “gratitude” etched into its front. And so, taking its advice, I thanked my teacher for the gift and tucked it into a tiny pocket of my backpack I almost never touch. See, when I reach into my backpack, I’m usually looking for something—my trigonometry notes, my calculator, my Chinese textbook—or because I have midterms, tests, and then finals to worry about. But now, I’m a sophomore, and that’s all still true! But my homework takes longer, my tests are harder, and for the first time ever, math doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So I forgot about that little rock.

That was until a couple of weeks ago when I happened to reach into that same forgotten pocket and found that little rock right where I had first left it, the word “gratitude” still etched into its front. At first, I smiled at the memory and my teacher’s kind gesture. Then I started to think. In the little over a year since I had first placed the rock in my backpack, I had become incredibly consumed by the homework I still needed to do, the test grades I didn’t yet know, and by my math grade—which is lower than I would like. Finding the rock reminded me that even in the tiny world of high school, I still have so much to be grateful for. Though my math grade may not be what I want, it has improved from where it was! My teacher has gone out of her way to meet with me on several occasions to help me better understand the material, and every academic challenge I’ve faced has helped me to develop better study and time management habits. But it’s easy to forget about gratitude when you’re charging ahead to what comes next. It’s difficult to pause and be grateful for what’s in front of you right now.

I’ve found that applies outside of school, too. When I was younger, my family and I would spend a large portion of the summer with my grandparents in the North Carolina mountains. One of our favorite activities were going on long walks or hikes together. Whenever we set out, I was always very eager for the adventures that lay ahead, oftentimes volunteering to wear a very stylish fanny pack, even when the length of a hike really didn’t necessitate it. But, my attitude usually changed around halfway in. I would start to complain that I was tired of walking and could think of nothing but getting back home to a yummy snack and my favorite kids’ show. My grandfather “Doc-Doc” usually had other ideas, and he always seemed to find ways to add to the length of a hike, never missing a teachable moment. He would often pause to ask what felt like ten million questions: “So Hannah, what type of plant is this,” or “so Hannah, can you name that mountain?” As expected for a kid my age, I almost never answered correctly, which meant an even longer conversation involving a history or science lesson. Despite being moments I now look back on fondly, my eagerness to get back home prevented me from appreciating this time with family and the incredible beauty of God’s creation surrounding me. Looking ahead to what could come next prevented me from being content with the blessings right in front of me.

In his Epistle to the Philippians, Paul writes that he has learned “the secret to being content in any and every circumstance, whether full or hungry or whether having plenty or being poor.” It sounds like an incredible secret; after all, it’s not easy to be content with the present when you don’t know what the future holds. But Paul gives away the secret in the next line. He says he is able to “endure all these things through the power of the one who gives [him] strength.” When we struggle to take moments to show gratitude or find ourselves ignoring what we already have, Paul teaches us to turn to God. Through God, we are able to find peace with what is in front of us now and give proper gratitude for all we have.

Joy,